"Formula" can be a bad word when it comes to music, but it needn't be. It's really just another term for "recipe" or "rules," and rules are what make particular types of music work the way they do. The blues is a formula. The sonata's a formula. And in house and techno, the four-to-the-floor kick is a formula, the one that makes it all click together like Legos. There are many such formulae in dance music; we could also just call them conventions. A lot of these conventions have to do with accommodating DJs, like 16-bar intros with little more than a steady kick and a hint of the tune to come, to facilitate mixing into the track that's finishing, or 16-bar outros that have been similarly thinned out to pave the way for the next succession of stepping stones.

Some formulae are less about the DJ than the listener, less functional than musically intuitive-- like a drum fill across the last few beats of the fourth bar, to send us hurtling into the next phrase, or a filter sweep at the end of a long breakdown, to build tension before the music returns at full power. These things can easily degenerate into cliché, as evidenced by the current crop of maximum-strength electro-house being flogged across stadium raves and super clubs, in which every functional trope is super-sized to the verge of self-parody. But in the hands of a producer like Radio Slave, the formula becomes the material itself. The form becomes the content.

This is one of the main things you'll take away from Works: Selected Remixes 2006-2010, a collection of the Berlin-based producer Matt Edwards' remix work for artists like UNKLE, Trentemøller, Minilogue, and Roman Flügel's Soylent Green. It's an impressive-- some might say daunting-- collection. There are only 22 tracks, but with the average length of around 10 minutes, they take up three CDs and nearly four hours' listening time. As compilations go, the list of artists remixed suggests a wide stretch of stylistic ground: Edwards tackles not just the work of like-minded dance artists like Len Faki, Mr. G, and Peace Division but also winsome indie pop from Mlle Caro & Franck Garcia and an Arthur Russell cover by alt-R&B types Yam Who?. (Even the Cult's Ian Astbury wails his way into the mix, via UNKLE's "Burn My Shadow".)

But as disparate as the source material can be, a remarkable uniformity prevails across the remixes. As Radio Slave, Edwards essentially does one groove. (He explores other styles under aliases like Rekid, Cabin Fever, and the Machine, and in the duo Quiet Village.) It's a rolling, gliding, tech-house cadence built upon sturdy kick drums and immaculately carved hi-hats, so cleanly cut they might be a jeweler's work. It's the archetypal house groove, with shakers and hi-hats on the upbeats and claps on the 2 and 4; every new track feels like a variation upon the last. It's a formula, but Edwards is a master of tweaking the internal proportions, sliding elements forward or backward against the beat to give it a sense of swing. He threads ostinato tones through the upper register like a guy wire, a taut line arrowing off toward the horizon and from which every other element hangs. He favors dry claps and snares to accentuate the cavernous empty space between the beats, and the bass is more felt than heard: rarely could it be called a "line," just the moody cushion on which everything nervously rests.

He deploys syncopated toms or chord stabs, often buried subliminally deep in the mix, to add even more tension. And he knows how to draw out a phrase for 16 or 32 bars, sketching broad arcs over rhythms that seem never to change, as though teasing the course of time itself. Virtually every track here, at once languid and tightly wound, is a master class in what makes this particular kind of groove tick. Across the 22 tracks, these tropes reappear so often that it's hard to tell whether they're tactics or tics. So I tried a little experiment.

I was inspired by something I found on SoundCloud the other day. Created by a Britsh artist named Paul Chivers (aka ramjac), it's called "All Together Now: Everything the Beatles Ever Did", and that's exactly what it is: "Every Beatles tune, played together, sequenced in order of lengths, with the longest starting first and all 226 tunes ending together," as Chivers explains in his description. It begins with the familiar loops of "Revolution 9" and culminates in a maelstrom that might send Merzbow running for cover. It's a neat conceptual joke, but it also says something about the proportions of the Beatles' own chosen forms, and the way they grew out of them.

I wanted to see how well Radio Slave's remixes conform to an ideal type, so I dragged all seven tracks from the first CD of Works into Ableton Live, a music-production and sequencing application. I changed the tempos of the individual tracks slightly so that the beats were lined up, all of them beginning together, and I hit "Play." The result sounded remarkably like one single track-- or, at most, a mixed passage in a DJ set, where both tracks are at full volume.

There are key clashes galore, but that's not the point-- what's striking is how perfectly all the rhythmic elements line up. And, beyond that, how closely the tracks mirror each other in structure, swelling and fading in lockstep. Voices from disparate songs-- Ian Astbury, Mlle Caro, the singer from Trentemøller's "Moan"-- are teased in at roughly the same points in the composite track, a pile of codas upon codas. The fadeout is a uniform decrescendo. The shape of Edwards' ideal form burns like a filament in a dimly lit room. The results reminded me of Idris Khan's superimposed collages of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, photographers obsessed with documenting archetypal architectural forms. All of that, and still: If you were at a club and heard this coming from the speakers, you'd probably think, "Hm, a little busy, but it works."

All of this isn't to reduce Radio Slave's remix work to a caricature-- quite the opposite. (Not everything on the compilation follows the pattern: "Go Bang", the Arthur Russell rework, is a glorious mess of unhinged disco, and Edwards' remix of Nelski's "Body Pop" pairs Latin pianos with dub chords to collapse New York's Body and Soul into Berlin's Panorama Bar-- a superimposition of a very different sort.) In fact, the experiment actually increased my appreciation for Edwards' craft. It's not easy to be this consistent without bogging down in old habits. No matter how formally similar each track may be, the best of them-- like his remixes of Soylent Green's "La Forza Del Destino", Matt O'Brien's "Serotone", and Mr. G's "Sometimes I Cry"-- jump out of the speakers with rare intensity. You may not always be able to ID them, but if you've heard them on a dance floor, you know them in your bones.